Re: [EMOXG] Deliverable report published as first draft: Emotion Markup Language: Requirements with Priorities

Dear Bill,

Bill Jarrold schrieb:
> My comments have to do with requirement for expressing amounts.  These 
> comments apply to Core 6 and Core 8.
> 
> Core 6 says "The emotion markup must provide an emotion attribute to 
> represent the intensity of an emotion.  The intensity is a dimension 
> with values in [0,1]"
> 
> Core 8 says "The emotion markup shuld provide emotion attributes to 
> represent the various kinds of regulation.  The value of these 
> attributes should be in [0,1]."

Actually, a similar issue also reappears for Core 3 (dimensions), Core 4 
(appraisals), and maybe in Core 9 (Action tendencies -- if these are 
scales). We will also have the scales issue in Meta 1 (confidence / 
probability) and Meta 3 (Acting).

There are two questions here, to my mind:

a) can we specify whether a scale is unipolar (e.g., [0,1] or
"not-a little-more-a lot") or bipolar (e.g., [-1,1] or
"very bad-bad-neutral-good-very good")? Some scales (such as intensity) 
are clearly unipolar, others (such as the valence dimension) are clearly 
bipolar, and others (e.g., the arousal dimension) are sometimes treated 
as unipolar and sometimes as bipolar.

b) how do we express the "amount" on the scale; this is the issue that 
Bill has analysed and illustrated.


Much of this discussion is already for the actual specification; in the 
present requirements document, I think we should point out the issue but 
not yet try to solve it.


Just to add my two cents to the discussion:

I have one serious worry, and that is, if too many things are left 
optional and flexible, the language will not be useful as a standard: 
everybody will use it in their own specific way, and interoperability 
becomes impossible. So we must be very careful with every *choice* we 
introduce, such as the choice between quantitative and qualitative scale 
values. From that point of view, I would have preferred to stick to a 
single representation for scale values.

On the other hand, I can absolutely follow Bill's reasoning in favour of 
qualitative / fuzzy scale labels, both in general and relative to a 
particular class. I would like to understand better who / which use 
cases would be using the qualitative labels:
- automatic recognition?
- manual annotation?
- reasoning?
- synthesis?

Could I have feedback from the group on this -- who would need 
qualitative labels for their work?

I am less convinced by the "units", I cannot remember a case at the 
moment where that was proposed in the literature.

Best wishes,
Marc


> I consider a value range of [0,1] to be a unitless value range.
> 
> This is good.  But I think we want to give annotators more options for 
> these values than just [0,1].
> 
> One reason that merely [0,1] may not be enough is this: Is it really 
> true that there is a maximum amount of a particular emotion?  A maximal 
> amount of experiencable joy?  How depressing ! (-:  Having a fixed max 
> or min seems to be taking a theoretical stand that might be quite valid 
> for some theories but not all theories.
> 
> Okay, so, the basic idea is that we should allow additional means to 
> express intensity. In particular we should allow [a] qualitative values 
> [b] qualitative values relative to a particular class [c] a partial 
> ordering of values [d] unit based values.
> 
> Do we need [a] AND [b] AND [c] AND [d]?  I don't know.  Lets consider 
> each one as a separate amendment.  Maybe we'll want just [a] but not 
> [b], [c], or [d].  Let's discuss which if any of these additions we want.
> 
> I will now describe each of [a], [b], [c] and [d] and try to provide an 
> evocative use case (expressed in English)
> 
> [a] Qualitative Values
> 
> In a mushy area sometimes all we can assert are values like high, medium 
> or low.  E.g.  "Fred felt a lot of anger."  How much is a lot?  .7, .8, 
> .9?  The value can be quite arbitrary.  Thus we want a set of 
> qualitative values such as "high", "medium", "low", "very high", "very 
> low" etc......[Sure, a given researcher should be able map high to .9 or 
> 0.77 if he decides to later on down the road in his/her markup 
> activity.  So, there would also need to be vocab to optionally map such 
> vocab to actual numbers.]
> 
> [b] qualitative values relative to a particular class
> 
> This is basically [a] except you can relativize the qualitative value
> to a particular class.  E.g.
> 
> "Fred felt a low amount of anger for a New Yorker"
> 
> "Joe felt a low amount of love for a California Hippie During the
> Summer of Love"
> 
> "Subject24601 expressed a medium amount of surprise for Sample Set 35
> As Rated by Graduate Student Joe"
> 
> We would do this kind of thing (i.e. [a] or [b]) all the time with a 
> knowledge rep /
> ontology system such as Cyc or the Knowledge Machine (and the
> Component Library associated with it) [references happily furnished if
> you ask].  For example the express the concept that "Fred is short for
> a basketball player and tall for a pigmy." (We'll really we'd say that
> the value of the height property for Fred was Low with respect to the
> class Basketball Player but High for the class Pigmy".  It stands to 
> reason that if this kind of scheme has been developed for these projects 
> for quantities like height we should also do it for emotion.
> 
> [Of course, the user of Cyc or KM can specify stuff like "Short for a 
> Basketball Player is 5 feet 9 inches." as well]
> 
> [c] a partial ordering of values
> 
> The idea here is we want to handle cases where we do not wish to nail
> down any particular value for an emotion intensity but do wish to say
> that one value is greater or less than another.
> 
> E.g. "The level of Fred's happiness today is higher than it was
> yesterday."
> 
> [d] unit based values.
> 
> I don't know of any scheme for quantifying emotion intensity on some
> sort of scale.  However, we should allow (and encourage) researchers
> who have devised such a scale to use use it.  This scheme would allow
> the annotator to associate a value with a particular set of units of 
> his/her
> chosing."
> 
> E.g. "Using his new instrument, Joe the Scientist measured Fred's
> happiness as 75 felicitons."
> 
>  "Using her new instrument, Sally the Scientist measured Fred'shappiness
> as 3.2 kilofelicitons."
> 
>  "Using her new instrument, Jing the Scientist measured Fran's pride as 
> -1.98 shameitrons."
> 
> Well, the examples might sound a little silly, but hopefully they 
> illustrate the need for what
> I am making the case for.  We can make the examples more sober and 
> scientifically plausible in
> due course as necessary.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> Bill
> 
>>
>>
>> This document gives us a pretty concrete starting point for thinking 
>> about syntax now. I believe we should come to a conclusion about which 
>> format to use (XML vs. RDF vs. OWL) in May, and start drafting a 
>> syntax specification from June onwards.
>>
>> Does this sound reasonable? Let's get back to work! :-)
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Marc
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher at DFKI GmbH
>> Coordinator EU FP7 Project SEMAINE http://www.semaine-project.eu
>> Chair W3C Emotion ML Incubator http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion
>> Portal Editor http://emotion-research.net
>> Team Leader DFKI Speech Group http://mary.dfki.de
>> Project Leader DFG project PAVOQUE http://mary.dfki.de/pavoque
>>
>> Homepage: http://www.dfki.de/~schroed
>> Email: schroed@dfki.de
>> Phone: +49-681-302-5303
>> Postal address: DFKI GmbH, Campus D3_2, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-66123 
>> Saarbrücken, Germany
>> -- 
>> Official DFKI coordinates:
>> Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH
>> Trippstadter Strasse 122, D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
>> Geschaeftsfuehrung:
>> Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
>> Dr. Walter Olthoff
>> Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
>> Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313
>>
> 

-- 
Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher at DFKI GmbH
Coordinator EU FP7 Project SEMAINE http://www.semaine-project.eu
Chair W3C Emotion ML Incubator http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion
Portal Editor http://emotion-research.net
Team Leader DFKI Speech Group http://mary.dfki.de
Project Leader DFG project PAVOQUE http://mary.dfki.de/pavoque

Homepage: http://www.dfki.de/~schroed
Email: schroed@dfki.de
Phone: +49-681-302-5303
Postal address: DFKI GmbH, Campus D3_2, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-66123 
Saarbrücken, Germany
--
Official DFKI coordinates:
Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH
Trippstadter Strasse 122, D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
Geschaeftsfuehrung:
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Walter Olthoff
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313

Received on Thursday, 8 May 2008 08:59:45 UTC